By utilitarianism I shall mean the same thing as hedonism or welfarism, to wit, the idea that there is some concept of welfare (or of ‘wellbeing’, ‘psychological happiness’, ‘pleasure’, ‘feeling good’, ‘valent experience’, etc.), which has ultimate moral importance. Here I include not only those who think only welfare has ultimate moral importance, but also whoever thinks more than one type of thing has ultimate moral importance, as long as welfare is allowed to take precedence over other concerns in at least some practical cases.
Ultimate, or terminal, moral importance is to be contrasted with instrumental moral importance. As an example of instrumental moral importance, a concept similar to ‘welfare’ can be held to be instrumentally morally important in some theory such as the remainder of this paragraph. Suppose that it is ultimately morally valuable for humans to exercise their faculty of reasoning as much as possible, and suppose further that there is some level of suffering which makes it impossible to reason. Then it is morally important, although only for the sake of reason (and hence instrumentally), that humans should experience that level of suffering as little as possible.
In speaking of ‘moral’ importance, I assume the Highest-Order Norm Thesis.
Utilitarianism, in this broad sense, is closely related to what Agnes Callard, in Open Socrates, referred to as the bodily command.
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| Illustration for this blog post, drawn by Nano Banana. |
Contents
Utilitarianism vs. the pursuit of truth
Utilitarianism, at least in the narrow sense of axiological act-utilitarianism, is directly incompatible with the social practice of truth-seeking.
David Lewis has soundly argued that act-utilitarianism is not incompatible with following a linguistic convention of truthfulness, and hence with valuing speaking truthfully in everyday language; but the social practice of truth-seeking, or inquiry in dialogue, requires a truth-norm which is absolutely inviolable in every context, as I have shown.
Such an inviolable rule is something that act-utilitarians themselves admit is not supported by their theory, and indeed, it is often hailed as an advantage of act-utilitarianism, that it can justify officious lies when they will save lives, or whatever.
Hence, axiological act-utilitarians are in open opposition to the social possibility of the pursuit of truth; and I claim that this likely applies to many other forms of welfarism, hedonism, etc., since a rule-utilitarian will plausibly make a (suitably lawlike and universal) exception for officious lies. If welfare has terminal value and is allowed to even sometimes override concern for truth-seeking, we get morally wrong conclusions, as I have shown.
It is no wonder that there are many utilitarians who assign numbers to quantities of welfare, but who are wholly unconcerned with how those number assignments are to be supported (which cannot be done rationally, as Rothbard showed, although he incorrectly tried to rescue a non-numerical concept of welfare); for someone who is unconcerned with cooperative truth-seeking will also be unconcerned with meaningfulness of speech.
Utilitarianism vs. sound philosophy
Commitments very close to utilitarianism also materially imply, more or less, every single wrong opinion that has ever been held in philosophy and economics; the remaining paragraphs in this section will each give one major example of an implication of utilitarianism and link a reference to explain why it is wrong.
Misguided politics
Although there have been utilitarian libertarians such as David Friedman, their rotten foundations makes them structurally devoid of a principled theory of justice in property, and practically incapable of radicalism in strategy.
In fact, a plausible welfarist concern with making it forbidden for “any person to unilaterally, discretionarily, and foreseeably act in a way that would leave others with less advantage than they would have possessed had the agent made some other choice” (with advantage conceived of in welfaristic terms), plausibly implies the rejection of all external private property in moral principle, as Jesse Spafford has shown, so that luck-egalitarian claims to expropriation and redistribution would be justified. But such a rejection of private property in moral principle is also incompatible with the social practice of truth-seeking, as I have shown.
Socialist central planning, usually described with vague meaningless slogans like “according to need”, also tends to be conceived of in hedonistic terms; and it is impossible for socialist central planning to achieve its goals, as Ludwig von Mises showed. (No, computers cannot solve the problem Mises raised.)
Misguided personal choices
Wellbeing-sensitive consequentialism is also at the core of the Effective Altruism movement, which focuses on “efficient” charitable donations. But von Mises’s economic calculation problem, which makes socialist central planning impossible, also makes it impossible for charities to operate efficiently, as Nathan P. Goodman pointed out, although he supports giving to charity nevertheless.
Relatedly, when added to a plausible psychology of animals, utilitarianism implies moral concern for animal welfare, as Peter Singer has shown, to an extent that plausibly requires veganism. (I should note that animal rights activists often try to frame the historical recognition of the shared humanity of fellow humans, such as in the abolition of slavery and the liberation of women, as a “moral circle expansion” which may eventually expand further to include nonhuman animals; and this is because they are dishonest.) But such a concern for animal welfare, to such an extent, is in tension with the social practice of truth-seeking, which provides moral (highest-order) license for eating meat (regardless whether it comes from cruel factory farms), as I have shown. (It is no coincidence that animal-rights activists defend human rights infringements as a means to their cause. I have left open the possibility that a norm requiring veganism may be justified by a cultural, nonmoral, lower-order commitment, as with how violations of etiquette are forbidden but not in themselves immoral; this may happen with some religious forms of veganism.)
David Benatar’s antinatalism, which is bad for more or less the same reasons as animal-welfare-motivated veganism, is also defended from a welfare-sensitive axiology.
Misguided metaphysics
It is tempting to believe that the entities that a theory quantifies over are real entities; this is, in fact, required by neo-Quinean metaontologies. And since utilitarianism ascribes ultimate value to mental states of wellbeing, it quantifies over them, tempting utilitarians to be realists about mental states in a way that allows for them to be ranked in an order. Since it is unclear how human behaviors of happiness and sadness can be so ranked, this utilitarian-realist commitment tends to be a motivation for dualism in the philosophy of mind (so that pleasure and pain are qualia), or for identifying minds with their neural or computational features (so that pleasure and pain are neural or computational configurations). But all such opinions are irrational, since logical behaviorism is true instead and is rationally required, as I have shown.
Welfarist axiologies are also behind most formulations of the so-called “problem of evil” which motivates atheism, since it is much harder to formulate coherently in welfare-insensitive axiologies; and I have also proved atheism to be false.
Uncharitable remarks on utilitarianism
Being fair to utilitarianism is distinct from being charitable to it, as justice is distinct from charity. (I use ‘fairness’ and ‘justice’ interchangeably.)
If we are fair to utilitarianism, we shall uncharitably but fairly say that there is nothing at all to be correctly said in its favor; that it can only be motivated by an attitude of intrinsic irrationality which not only does not value truth-seeking, but indeed fiercely hates the pursuit of truth, and hates all truth because it is true, and spends its days seeking to believe falsehoods because they are false, and to forget any truths it may have learned; that to even get utilitarianism off the ground dialectically, you have to assume a whole edifice of lies about how language works, about how logic works, about how history works, etc.; that utilitarianism is, in itself, an edifice of lies, believed in by villains, for the purpose of murder; that the people who defend it are, to the extent that they defend it, a plague upon humanity, whose ideas have no value, and should never be listened to; that to the extent that they defend it, while it is, of course, a moral and economic tragedy when any one of them dies (as it is when any human being dies), still nothing of intellectual value is, to that extent, lost to those deaths, and in fact our theoretical understanding of the world is improved to an extent, as a consequence of their deaths, by no longer being marred with their confusions; that this is all true with absolute certainty beyond a shadow of a doubt, and that there are no exceptions.
These true, and perfectly fair, but nevertheless uncharitable things, are said to emphasize that a fair verdict on utilitarianism (by which, again, I mean the broad idea of a concept of wellbeing which has ultimate moral importance) is uniformly and hyperbolically negative, and that whenever anything good is said about utilitarianism, it comes from charity, not from justice.
We may, of course, in perfect fairness excuse many self-described utilitarians as not being culpable for their adherence to the utilitarian attitude – since they were duped, or confused, or dazed; but the ideal outcome, at any rate, is if every avowed adherent to utilitarianism (or welfarism, hedonism, etc.), renounces his chosen ideals, publicly execrates and condemns them, never looks back at them or considers them again, and censures all his colleagues if they ever again speak favorably of them, nevermind act upon them. It is a tragedy that this will not happen.
Charitably, we may say that utilitarianism at least seems unrelated to the overuse of probability theory in some of the communities where it is popular, although it might not be a coincidence that the same communities are attracted to two kinds of irrationality.
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| Comparison of a utilitarian and a deontologist, made with Nano Banana. The portrayal on the right is intended to portray whoever is a utilitarian in the very broad sense above, and hence includes positions that are sometimes said to be between deontology and consequentialism. |
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